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All Eyes on the Ball, Not the Condos

THIS IS REALITY Jason Abrams, far left, with the football player Vernon Davis, the interior decorator Anton Barns, and Lisa Cordero and Kristen Cook, both real estate agents, visiting a property on “Scoring the Deal.”Credit
Hgtv/Scripps Networks

PROFESSIONAL athletes who have just signed seven- and eight-figure contracts can, virtually overnight, become enthusiastic investors in high-end real estate.

But their eyes are often bigger than their wallets, and their shopping sprees to pick up properties often get them into financial trouble, particularly after their playing days are over.

In 2009, Sports Illustrated estimated that 78 percent of N.F.L. players go bankrupt or face serious financial stress within two years of hanging up their spikes. Some 60 percent of N.B.A. players go broke within five years, the magazine found.

Jason Abrams, a real estate broker who lives in Birmingham, Mich., said he had seen a lot of financial heartache over the past nine years of selling and renting homes to sports stars. One former player with the Dallas Cowboys told him six months ago that he owned 26 homes, some of which had gone into foreclosure.

So Mr. Abrams has added a goal for his company, the Abrams Team, which is part of the Keller Williams national realty firm: to reduce the number of bankruptcies among current and former professional athletes.

He tells the athletes that they need to come out of college “thinking about one thing: ‘How am I going to be a star in this man’s league?’ You have to have razor focus.”

To that end, the agent insists that all athletes he works with rent, not buy, in their first year in the league, whether they are the first pick in the draft or an undrafted free agent.

Mr. Abrams, a 33-year-old college dropout, has even turned his man-on-a-mission message into a reality TV show. He is focused on being the “Jerry Maguire of real estate,” as he says on the show, “Scoring the Deal,” which had its debut this month on HGTV.

A camera crew follows him around the country as he helps athletes buy, sell and rent homes. The show offers a peek at the fast-paced world of sports star real estate, in which athletes are often pressed for time to shop for a new home after being drafted or traded.

Mr. Abrams is portrayed as working in 48-hour cycles with one client, and he sometimes jets between cities where he is working deals during the same half-hour episode. Is Mr. Abrams really a do-gooder? Or is this just clever self-promotion? After watching two episodes, despite Mr. Abrams’s stated goal of warning athletes about real estate pitfalls, I didn’t see a lot of education going on.

Viewers looking for the sort of alpha male posturing that occurs between the brokers Fredrik Eklund and Ryan Serhant on Bravo’s “Million Dollar Listing New York” might want to change the channel.

Mr. Abrams said he had sold HGTV his idea for the show because the network hadn’t required it to be “drama-based.” He said there was no “baby-mama-drama,” nor were there manipulated scenes, as some critics have suggested of “MDLNY.” “I wanted to make a show that was true to what we do,” he said.

Photo

GAME DAY Vontae Davis, left, and Jason Abrams.Credit
Hgtv/Scripps Networks

Without the catfights, what passes for tension on the show? Well, there’s the appalling lack of three-bedroom apartments to rent in New Orleans for under $5,000 a month for Greivis Vásquez, a 26-year-old basketball player with the Hornets, as depicted in an episode on Tuesday. Or the fact that Mr. Abrams said he hadn’t slept in his own bed in Michigan for five weeks.

In another episode, Mr. Abrams frets over whether Nicole June, the wife of the former football player Cato June, will approve any of the three places he has selected in Manhattan. (The family wants an apartment in the city so Mr. June can be closer to a Broadway play he has invested in.) While riding in a limousine at episode’s end, she gives Mr. Abrams the green light to try to negotiate a SoHo loft down to their budget range of $5 million to $10 million, from $13.7 million.

While reality shows can often inspire eye-rolling guffaws about just how “real” they are, Mr. Abrams, with his heavy Michigan accent and unbuttoned appearance, comes off as a down-to-earth guy who understands how to cater to the athletes and their needs.

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And athletes do have particular needs. Basketball and football players often don’t fit into conventional showers or bathtubs and have to worry about low ceilings. They don’t have the time or the inclination, in most cases, to do major decorating, especially when they are still single. They want agents to walk their dogs and be available 24/7 to let people in for visits, said Andrew Azoulay, a broker at Town Residential in New York.

Their first home is all about “flash,” Mr. Abrams said, and it might include black leather wallpaper or exotic dancing poles. Or a master bed whose headboard doubles as a fish tank, like the one Clinton Portis, the former Washington Redskins running back, installed (at a cost of more than $100,000) after he bought his home in McLean, Va., in 2004. When it came time to sell in 2011, Mr. Portis had to leave it for the next owner; the cost to move it was “confiscatory,” Mr. Abrams said.

While prices vary from city to city, Mr. Abrams has found that most name-brand athletes are looking for homes between $5 million and $15 million; the vast majority of athletes, of course, live in homes that cost less than $5 million, he said.

There are outsize exceptions. The Yankees third baseman Alex Rodriguez was selling his nine-bedroom home in Miami Beach for $38 million, until he pulled it off the market this week for undisclosed reasons. The former baseball player Barry Bonds has listed his seven-bedroom home in Beverly Hills for $25 million.

And top athletes have paid top dollar for rentals. Before buying a Manhattan pad at the Rushmore at 80 Riverside Boulevard, Mr. Rodriguez rented at 15 Central Park West for $30,000 a month. Before looking to buy in Miami, Ray Allen, a basketball player for the Heat, rented a 10-bedroom house for $50,000 a month, according to Mayi de la Vega, the chief executive of ONE Sotheby’s.

Renting a furnished apartment is the best way for a professional athlete to focus on earning that first contract, Mr. Abrams insists.

“The only thing you should be bringing is your suitcase,” he said. “We are not buying beds, we are not buying paintings, and we really shouldn’t be buying jewelry. What we should be buying is time: time to review the playbook, time to start working out, time to find a chef in the area that is going to cook healthy for you, time to find a trainer that will work with you on the weekends.”

Given Mr. Abrams’s grueling schedule — he said he was on the road 309 days last year — you have to wonder if he is taking his own advice about a healthy lifestyle. His wife, an architect, is expecting their first child, a son, in late March.

But Mr. Abrams is not toting a football for a living, just a cellphone. Despite his profession, he is not a big believer in real estate as an investment. He and his wife rent. “We are buying freedom on a daily basis,” he said.

In his view, athletes are not well equipped to speculate on real estate and often struggle to unload multiple homes once they realize they can’t afford them.

“You are never going to make more money speculating on real estate than scoring touchdowns,” Mr. Abrams says he tells his clients. “You should put your money into something boring and safe, like a bond portfolio.”